The Benefits of Giving Your Frontline Leaders a Clear Vision
Feb 16, 2023
A vision is a way of working as well as outlines what you want to achieve. It encompasses your teams’ purpose, values, strategy and goals and communicates what it will look, feel and sound like. It’s the why, how and what.
Its easy to focus on task and process, or hard metrics (budgets, KPI’s and targets), a vision should also include how you want your team to be. What culture do you want in your team? What behaviours are important? What do you want to achieve?
It’s a fundamental leadership skill to be able to create a vision for your team that not only tells them where they are going it creates a clear path forward that inspires their contribution, simply because they believe in where they are going.
Giving your frontline leaders a clear vision is like creating a ripple in a pond, it creates a foundation for them to do the same with their team and so on. The end result being your vision filtering through your whole team bringing everyone to a common purpose.
By committing to having a clear vision and communicating that to your frontline leaders helps them to understand the purpose of their role in the big picture and supports them to articulate their vision to their team in their own words.
How to create and communicate a clear vision:
- Keep it simple, summarise your vision into one clear sentence. This gives your people something to refer back to and creates a common language.
- Know your purpose. Why is the team there, what is the teams role and the role of everyone within it.
- Know your shared values; these do not need to reflect the company values, as long as they align your team and how it operates with the overall vision and organisation.
- What does winning look like? Create your vision around what you want to achieve and set milestones to celebrate your wins along the way.
- Check that your purpose, values, strategy, goals and overall vision are in alignment. For example, if your expectation is for your team to live your values having unrealistic targets will undermine that.
- Communicate and consult. Don’t be so tied to your vision that you cant take on board feedback. Consult your frontline leaders, get buy in and let them create their own ripple.
- Re-visit throughout the year. Regular (quarterly works well) check ins keep everyone on track with the vision and helps to track progress.
I would love to hear your thoughts on creating your vision, or if you are thinking about a leadership development workshop for your team or 1:1 coaching get in touch [email protected]
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